Attila Dimedici writes "Charles Babcock of Information Week published an interesting article suggesting that Microsoft will have to at least to some degree take Windows open source if they want to stay in business. He suggests that the money to be made from the things MS builds on top of Windows (Office, Server, SQL Server, Exchange, Sharepoint, etc.) is so much greater than what can be made from Windows itself that MS will have to give up the revenue stream from Windows in order to maintain these other, more valuable, revenue streams."

Smivs writes "The BBC are reporting on the development of tiny motors the size of a grain of salt which could power surgical Microbots. Some surgical procedures are hindered by the size or inflexibility of current instruments. For example, the labyrinthine network of blood vessels in the brain prevents the use of catheters threaded through larger blood vessels. Researchers have long envisioned that trends of miniaturisation would lead to tiny robots that could get around easily in the body. The problem until now has been powering them. Conventional electric motors do not perform as well as they are scaled down in size. As they approach millimetre dimensions, they barely have the power to overcome the resistance in their bearings. Now, research reported in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering has demonstrated a motor about 1/4mm wide, about the width of two human hairs."

ancientribe writes "Security experts are cautiously on the lookout for some lesser-known but potentially lethal threats that could be more difficult to prepare for and defend against in 2009. These aren't your typical enterprise hack attacks. They're mainly large-scale Internet threats — attacks that knock out sections of the Internet infrastructure, radical extremist hackers, Web attacks that adversely affect online ad revenue, and even the unthinkable: human casualties as a result of a cyberattack." Also known as the new group of things the fear mongers will use to make you do their bidding.